These are the real lost stories of J.D. Salinger. These are unpublished, and we have never seen them. They do exist, but it is doubtful that anyone will be able to find them any time soon. Some live in the Princeton University Library Archives and are available for viewing, though they don’t let people take in any recording devices to smuggle them out!
Most of this information comes directly from a text file which came into my hands from a blessed reader of these pages. Sadly, we don’t even have a source to thank for the editorial comments which follow some of the stories. Some information was also found in the various biographical and critical books about JDS.
Early Stories
Salinger begain submitting stories for publication in 1940 and continued in earnest until he joined the army.
- The Survivors (1939)
- The long hotel story (1940)
- The Fishermen (1941)
- Lunch For Three (1941)
- I Went to School with Adolph Hitler (1941)
- Monologue for a Watery Highball (1941)
- The Lovely Dead Girl at Table Six (1941)
- Paula (1941) (currently at the University of Texas)
- The Kissless Life of Reilly (1942)
- The Last and Best of the Peter Pans (1942) (currently at the Firestone Library)
- Holden On the Bus (1942)
War Stories
After joining the army, Salinger continued to write but his subject matter turned to the war.
- Men Without Hemingway (1942)
- Over the Sea Let’s Go, Twentieth Century Fox (1942)
- The Broken Children (1943)
- Rex Passard on the Planet Mars (1943)
- Bitsey (1943)
- What Got Into Curtis in the Woodshed (1944)
- Total War Diary or The Children’s Echelon (1944) (currently at the Firestone Library)
- Boy Standing in Tennessee (1944) (prototype of This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise)
- What Babe Saw or Ooh-La-La! (1944) (prototype of A Boy in France)
- The Magic Foxhole (1944) (currently at the Firestone Library)
- Two Lonely Men (1944) (currently at the Firestone Library)
- A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt (1944)
Post-War Stories
After the war, Salinger’s fame led to fewer rejections.
- The Daughter of the Late, Great Man (1945)
- The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls (1945) (currently at the Firestone Library)
- The Male Goodbye or Birthday Boy (1946) (currently at the University of Texas)
- The Boy in the People Shooting Hat (1948)
- A Summer Accident (1949)
- Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera (1950)
- Ivanoff, the Terrible (1956) (prototype of Zooey)
- Salinger later submitted an essay to Saturday Review concerning Ross, Shawn, and the New Yorker. The manuscript is “an open-letter essay, 25-30 pp., submitted in 1960…and rejected because of its length and unusual style.”